Saudi Arabia Prepares Land and Sea Push Against the Houthis to Reopen Red Sea Oil Route

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Saudi Arabia is preparing for a major military operation against the Houthi movement by sea and possibly by land in central Yemen, in an attempt to break the pressure the group has placed on Saudi oil exports through the southern Red Sea. Reporting on the preparations points to Saudi forces withdrawing from eastern Yemen and concentrating elsewhere, movements read as groundwork for a ground offensive rather than a redeployment.

The likely focus of any land operation is al-Bayda, a governorate in central southern Yemen that the Houthis captured in 2020 and 2021. Al-Bayda sits at the junction of the Houthi-controlled north and the government-held south and east, and control there shapes access routes towards both Marib and the southern governorates. It is difficult terrain, and previous attempts by government-aligned forces to hold ground in the area have not lasted.

Alongside the land preparations, Riyadh is assembling a maritime effort. The Saudi defence ministry has said that 14 states — among them Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt, Sudan and Djibouti — issued a joint statement supporting a multinational maritime defence coalition to protect shipping in the Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandab strait. Saudi Arabia has invited a wider group of countries to take part, and membership has not been finalised. Riyadh has also approached the United States and European governments, including Germany, France and the United Kingdom. The European Union already runs a naval mission in the area, Operation Aspides, established to escort and protect commercial vessels.

The trigger for all of this was the Houthi declaration on 20 July of a naval blockade of Saudi Arabia. The group said it was responding to what it called an unjust siege imposed on Yemen for nearly twelve years and the plundering of the country’s resources, and has indicated the blockade would be lifted if Saudi restrictions on Yemen were lifted. Saudi officials reject that framing. It has not been established publicly whether the blockade is confined to Saudi-linked vessels or extends more broadly, and shipping operators have had to make their own risk assessments.

The timing matters because the Red Sea route had already become unusually important. Saudi crude has historically left the kingdom mainly through Gulf terminals and the Strait of Hormuz, with a smaller share moving overland by pipeline to Yanbu on the Red Sea coast. With Hormuz closed amid the wider confrontation between Iran and the United States, a much larger proportion of Saudi exports has been rerouted westward — which is precisely the flow the Houthi blockade is designed to interrupt. A chokepoint that was a secondary option has become the primary one, and it runs past a coastline the Houthis largely control.

The exchange has escalated quickly. Saudi Arabia has carried out air strikes on what it says are Houthi military facilities at the port of Hodeidah used to threaten commercial shipping. The Houthis have claimed attacks on Saudi Aramco installations, including infrastructure linking eastern province oilfields to Red Sea export facilities, and say they have struck Saudi commercial vessels in the Red Sea. Neither side’s claims can be independently verified in full, and both have incentives to overstate the damage they have inflicted and understate what they have absorbed.

The Houthis have also signalled an intention to impose tolls on shipping passing through Bab al-Mandab, which would convert a military campaign into a revenue stream and give the group a durable interest in maintaining leverage over the strait.

This is a return to direct Saudi–Houthi confrontation after a long period in which the two had been engaged in intermittent talks. Saudi Arabia intervened in Yemen in 2015 at the head of a coalition supporting the internationally recognised government after the Houthis seized Sana’a. The campaign became protracted and costly, and in recent years Riyadh had visibly sought an exit, pursuing back-channel negotiations and quietly reducing its exposure. A ground operation in central Yemen would reverse that trajectory.

The military logic is contested. Air power has not previously succeeded in dislodging the Houthis, who have absorbed years of bombardment and expanded their missile and drone capabilities in the process. A land campaign in mountainous central Yemen would require ground forces willing to hold territory, and the anti-Houthi camp remains divided between factions with competing regional backers and diverging objectives. The Houthis, meanwhile, describe the conflict as a struggle over Yemen’s future rather than a proxy war conducted on Iran’s behalf, a framing that has helped them recruit.

Civilians will absorb much of whatever follows. The United Nations estimates that more than 22 million people in Yemen will need humanitarian assistance during 2026, including 5.2 million internally displaced people, with 18.3 million acutely food insecure. Yemen imports the overwhelming majority of its food and fuel, and Hodeidah is the principal entry point for the north. Disruption to that port, or to the shipping lanes serving it, translates fairly directly into higher prices and thinner supplies in markets far from any front line.

Whether Riyadh actually launches a ground offensive or is applying pressure to strengthen its position remains unclear. Naval coalitions take time to assemble, and the states listed so far have not committed forces. What is already visible is a Red Sea in which commercial shipping, oil exports and the food supply of an impoverished country have all become instruments in a confrontation that neither side appears able to end on its own terms.